STORES Magazine - May 2008 - (Page L14)

COVER STORY Food Retailers and ORC early 94 percent of supermarket LP executives are allocating more resources to deter and detect ORC and to help law enforcement capture and prosecute the perpetrators, according to the results of a 2007 survey conducted for the Food Marketing Institute. These measures include: • Providing more LP training and installing more CCTV cameras (each cited by 52.3 percent) • Tracking these crimes regionally or nationally (50 percent) • Helping to develop legislation to address the problem (47.8 percent) • Adding security personnel (36.4 percent) and systems (31.8 percent) • Using product-marking technology to identify stolen products (34.1 percent) vestigating ORC incidents. Muscato characterizes the FBI action and the “We believe Congress needs to step increased emphasis on retail ORC in here and pass a bill so we can have units as “huge accomplishments” in better clarity in the federal codes with the fight against organized retail respect to organized retail crime and crime. more responsibility on the part of InIn the Polk County (Fla.) arrests ternet auction sites,” Kelley says. cited earlier, retail investigators and Those auction sites would be required law enforcement used software tools “to keep better records, including the to scan the Internet looking for aucaddresses and phone numbers” of intion or other websites that could be dividuals who sell $1,000 or more of a selling stolen product. High-volume product monthly or $12,000 worth of sellers were identified from their sella product in a year to protect against er IDs, says Joe LaRocca, NRF vice the sale of stolen merchandise. president of loss prevention, and “the State retail associations are also police knew exactly where to go to drafting proposed legislation that start searching and conducting surwould make it a felony to knowingly veillance.” buy and then resell stolen goods over LaRocca points out that such investhe Internet. tigations are most effective when At press time, draft legislation entimerchandise contains RFID tags or tled “Theft with Intent to Resell by Inother hidden labeling. Law enforceternet” had passed the Wisconsin Source: FMI Supermarket Security and ment recovering stolen property can House judiciary committee. If passed, Loss Prevention 2007 Report log onto LERPnet, a secure national the bill would offset the fact that Wisdatabase that allows retailers and law consin has one of the weakest deterenforcement agencies to share information about ORC acrents for penalizing people who steal from retailers (retail tivities, to see if any losses have been reported for those theft has to total at least $2,500 before the crime can be elitems. evated from a misdemeanor to a felony). Many LP specialists meet regularly with their counterMuscato, who helped write the draft of the proposed parts in other retail organizations and with law enforceWisconsin bill, strongly believes that ORC legislation ment to share information that could help thwart ORC acshould be separate and apart from e-commerce legislation tivity. Just as significantly, many retail LP departments are with its focus on penalizing people who knowingly sell working with their companies’ government affairs departstolen retail goods via the Internet. ments in lobbying for stiffer penalties for organized retail criminals. And their efforts are paying off. Difficult to enforce he Colorado Retail Association “worked very At a hearing of the House Judiciary crime, terrorism and hard” on its draft ORC/e-commerce legislation, homeland security subcommittee last October, Target vice but it ultimately failed because it was “written too president of assets protection Brad Brekke testified that rebroadly,” Muscato says. The bill would have prohibited tailers spend an estimated $12 billion annually to fight rethe Internet sale of items like baby formula, gift cards and tail theft. He also described how Target has built forensic FDA date-controlled OTC drugs, he says, but “whose deflaboratories with latent fingerprint and other technologies inition do we use to describe what is a non-prescription to support investigations. drug? Are vitamins non-prescription drugs? Diet pills? The Coalition Against Organized Retail Crime, whose “The bill was just too hard to enforce, and many legislamembers include Walgreen, Wal-Mart, Target and Macy’s, tors said that,” Muscato says. “They also said that if we has been lobbying for federal legislation to require online brought them something more specific, it would probably auction sites to disclose more information on high-volume have a good chance to pass.” sellers and to post serial numbers for products. CAORC Wisconsin’s e-commerce bill may be the first with a good also is seeking congressional action on a draft of an ORC chance of gaining passage, but 14 states have already instibill. tuted legislation specifically related to criminals who steal Ty Kelley, director of government relations for the Food retail merchandise with the intent to resell. Those states are Marketing Institute and co-chair of CAORC, says the Washington, New Jersey, Virginia, Alabama, Oregon, draft seeks to make ORC a federal felony and targets “the Nevada, Utah, Arizona, Texas, Louisiana, Florida, North rings that steal at store level” as well as the fences “who Carolina, Delaware and Colorado. fraudulently obtain goods and sell them.” N T L14 STORES / MAY 2008 WWW.LPINFORMATION.COM http://WWW.LPINFORMATION.COM

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of STORES Magazine - May 2008

Stores - May 2008 Contents Executive Editor's Page President's Page Contrasting C-Level Compensation Across Segments What Shoppers Think 10 Things You May Have Missed Numbers Worth Counting Full Price/Markdown Retail People Cover Story: Concepts That Clicked Concept2Watch Kiosks Artificial Intelligence Tech Support Online LPinformation Data Synchronization Human Resources Site Selection POS Selection Communications Biometrics Networking Systems Credit Loeb Retail Letter Arts Update Point of View NRF News Retail Crossword Retail Industry Calendar Last Laugh

STORES Magazine - May 2008

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